New Features

Feature

Description

Auto Scaling

Amazon EC2 now supports Auto Scaling. Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you're using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees.

Amazon EC2 now supports Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with Amazon EC2. It provides customers with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patternsincluding metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. To use Amazon CloudWatch, simply select the Amazon EC2 instances that you'd like to monitor; within minutes, Amazon CloudWatch will begin aggregating and storing monitoring data that can be accessed using web service APIs or Command Line Tools.

Known Issues

Windows AMIs take longer to launch than Linux/UNIX instances due to larger AMI sizes and multiple reboots.

Windows AMI sizes

Installing software on Windows AMIs can cause them to become large and easily reach the 10 GB limit. Before bundling, check the size of the C:\ volume.

Limitation on drive mapping

There is currently no support for volume attachment to devices beyond /dev/sdp on instances running Linux/UNIX and xvdp on instances running Windows.

Security group limitation

AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress does not allow port ranges for group grants when using the command-line tools or the Query API. This is only supported through the SOAP API.

Instance limit

New users are limited to a maximum of 20 concurrent instances, but many of our customers use hundreds or thousands of instances. If you need a higher limit, go to http://www.amazon.com/gp/html-forms-controller/ec2-request.